Validation of a secure blockchain architecture's effectiveness and robustness may be achieved via a methodical process that involves comprehensive testing and implementation in real-world environments. The testing process includes analyzing requirements, setting up the environment, and conducting detailed evaluations. All aspects of the smart contract, from its logic and functionality to its defences against common attack vectors like Sybil and re-entrancy vulnerabilities, are evaluated in these reports. Performance testing under different loads and realistic network conditions is essential for assessing scalability, latency, and throughput, in addition to API and integration testing, which ensure that system components operate well together. System resilience to defects and hostile events is tracked, critical test cases are automated, and large-scale peer-to-peer networks are modelled to evaluate the framework's robustness further. Supply chain verification and clinical trial administration are two examples of real-world applications of blockchain technology that demonstrate its ability to secure sensitive activities on a large scale. These use cases also give light on the system's efficacy, data integrity, and anomaly detection capabilities. Verifying the scalability, security, and reliability of a blockchain architecture against real business objectives via integrated deployments and complicated testing methods is essential for a safe blockchain.
The inherent challenge of balancing scalability, security, and decentralization â commonly termed the blockchain trilemma â continues to hinder the adoption of distributed systems. This paper presents InternxtChain, a decentralized storage framework designed to address this trilemma through a novel integration of erasure-coded sharding, zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), and a sharded Proof-of-Storage consensus mechanism. By leveraging aggregated BLS-381 signatures and distributed redundancy protocols, the framework achieves a throughput of 2,800 transactions per second with a latency of 420 milliseconds across 1,024 nodes, surpassing Filecoin by a factor of 3.5 and Ethereumâs capacity by 165 times. The system maintains 99.9% data integrity even under adversarial conditions involving 30% Byzantine nodes. Additionally, InternxtChain reduces storage costs to $0.002 per gigabyte, representing an 85% reduction compared to centralized alternatives like AWS S3. Empirical evaluations demonstrate linear scalability to 4,200 transactions per second with 2,048 nodes, alongside hardware affordability at $180 per node. These advancements not only outperform decentralized platforms in throughput by 2.8 times but also ensure GDPR-compliant data sovereignty, positioning InternxtChain as a pioneering solution for Web3 ecosystems seeking to harmonize enterprise-grade performance with decentralized trustlessness.
The digital transformation of higher education creates new opportunities to enhance the effectiveness, inclusiveness, and sustainability of dual education systems. However, empirical evidence on the integration of emerging technologies into dual education remains limited in developing and post-Soviet countries. This study investigates stakeholder perceptions of digital transformation in dual higher education in Uzbekistan and explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), and blockchain technologies to support inclusive and sustainable learning environments. A convergent mixed-methods design was used. Quantitative data were collected from 312 students and 80 industry representatives through structured surveys, while qualitative data were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 24 academic staff members involved in dual education programmes. Descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and thematic analysis were used to examine stakeholder readiness, implementation barriers, and future development priorities. The findings indicate strong support for digital transformation by stakeholders. Most students perceived dual education as more effective than traditional instruction (81%), and 74% expressed interest in AI- and VR-supported learning environments. Employers demonstrated a high readiness to adopt digital assessment tools (85%) and blockchain-based credential verification systems (80%). However, major challenges were identified, including insufficient digital infrastructure, limited funding, inadequate professional development opportunities, and regulatory uncertainty. Only 31% of students considered the existing digital infrastructure sufficient for advanced technology integration.Based on these findings, this study proposes an integrated framework that combines AI-driven personalized learning, VR-based experiential training, and blockchain-enabled credential verification within the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). The framework aims to enhance educational accessibility, strengthen industryâuniversity collaboration, and support equitable participation in dual higher education. This study contributes empirical evidence from a developing country context and offers practical recommendations for policymakers and higher education institutions seeking to implement inclusive and sustainable digital transformation strategies in dual education systems.
The rising use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the communication and automation landscape in various industries. However, the growing number of interconnected and vulnerable IoT devices has created several cybersecurity challenges, and the conventional intrusion detection system is not designed to handle the dynamicity of sophisticated cyber-attacks and secure information management. This study presents a blockchain-based security framework for intrusion detection in an IoT environment that uses a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to achieve high-level detection accuracy and blockchain technology to guarantee information security. Edge-IIoTset benchmark data containing about 2.2 million traffic instances and 61 traffic features were collected, preprocessed, and split into training, validation, and testing datasets at a ratio of 70:15:15 for model development and evaluation. The GRU network was trained to capture sequential patterns in network traffic with high accuracy, while the blockchain layer was leveraged to ensure secure detection record storage and information sharing. The model attained 99.12% accuracy, 99.08% precision, 98.97% recall, 99.02% F1-score, and 0.9987 ROC-AUC. Additionally, the blockchain layer achieved an average of 850 transactions per second with a 2.3-second block confirmation time, while the framework recorded an average of 3.2 millisecond traffic detection time. Thus, the proposed framework was efficient and effective in detecting and responding to cyber-attacks in an IoT network.
This article examines whether the procedural framework of the Federal Tax Ombudsman (âFTOâ) in Pakistan, established under the Establishment of the Office of Federal Tax Ombudsman Ordinance, 2000, to adjudicate complaints of maladministration arising under federal fiscal statutes, may be strengthened through the integration of Kleros, a blockchain-based crowdsourced dispute resolution mechanism. Drawing upon an original empirical dataset of one hundred and twenty-four cases registered between January 2023 and February 2025, the article finds that the average resolution period of cases before the FTO is approximately 191.3 days, rising to 503.3 days for complex matters that traverse review, representation, and remand, whereas the Kleros mechanism resolves disputes in an average of 13.23 days across 2,111 adjudicated cases. The article also situates its findings within institutional economics, identifying the FTO as a hierarchical governance structure and the Kleros mechanism as a market-based alternative. It views the difference in resolution times as a measure of transaction costs for taxpayers and administration. By measuring these costs, the article depicts that a market-based adjudicatory system significantly reduces them, enhancing institutional efficiency. It provides empirical evidence, illustrating the welfare gains from institutional substitution in transaction cost economics and institutional change. Against this benchmark, three integration models are proposed, namely a hybrid concurrent fact-finding model, a delegated crowdsourcing model with conditional executive review, and an amicus curiae model for technically complex matters such as the taxation of digital assets, each anchored in the updates introduced under Kleros V2, including Soulbound Tokens that enable expert-gated juror selection. The article identifies two structural gaps that necessitate reform, namely the revolving-door capture within the FTO secretariat and the jurisprudential bottleneck created at the Presidential secretariat following the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. It concludes that phased, pilot-based integration, commencing with the amicus curiae model in respect of complex subject-matter complaints, is jurisprudentially defensible, economically efficient, and operationally feasible within the legal framework of Pakistan.
Cloud-based academic environments such as Learning Management Systems (LMS), Open Journal Systems (OJS), institutional repositories, and web applications face increasing cybersecurity challenges due to heterogeneous users, distributed services, and extensive exposure to public networks. Existing security approaches remain fragmented, where machine learning focuses on threat detection, Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) emphasizes access control, and blockchain is primarily used for secure logging. The lack of integration among these components limits the ability of security systems to adapt dynamically to evolving cyber threats. This study proposes an Adaptive Cybersecurity Framework (ACF) that integrates unsupervised machine learning-based anomaly detection, a risk-based Zero Trust Policy Engine, and blockchain-based immutable audit logging within a continuous adaptive feedback loop. The framework was evaluated using 450,000 anonymized HTTP and Web Application Firewall (WAF) events collected from a multi-domain academic cloud environment consisting of LMS, OJS, repositories, and supporting web applications. The analysis revealed structured and repetitive attack behaviors dominated by automated endpoint probing and cross-domain propagation patterns, indicating ecosystem-level security threats. The proposed risk assessment mechanism demonstrated effective alignment between anomaly detection and policy-based decision making. Experimental results achieved an AUROC of 0.7296 for risk-based threat detection while maintaining an average decision latency of approximately 11 ms, indicating suitability for real-time deployment. Blockchain integration further provided verifiable, tamper-resistant audit trails for mitigation actions and policy enforcement activities. This study contributes an ecosystem-aware adaptive cybersecurity paradigm that bridges threat detection, policy enforcement, and auditability through a unified security architecture for Academic Cloud Environments.
The exponential emergence of cross-chain data sharing in blockchain-enabled IoT and cloud systems creates vital challenges in the scalability, privacy, and post-quantum security landscapes. To tackle these problems, we propose a hierarchical attribute clustering-attribute-based encryption (HAC-ABE) scheme in this paper, which offers a secure post-quantum cross-blockchain data exchange framework. The method utilizes hierarchical attribute clustering and lattice-based encryption to reduce the computation overhead while supporting fine-grained access control. It utilizes IPFS decentralized storage and smart contracts to achieve a transparent data exchange across chains. Experimental results show 9.7% faster computation time and much lower communication overheads than state-of-the-art ABE-based approaches, verifying its effectiveness and scalability for practical decentralized environments.
Newborn misidentification poses serious patient safety and accountability problems, but errors can be traced through the use of a blockchain to create an audit trail. However, a blockchain storing raw or even hashed biometric templates for individual identities is not acceptable for privacy reasons. This work redefines our prior work (1) to form a privacy-preserving audit protocol that isolates the processes of capturing a biometric and matching it against a database of known identities to an external Service Provider and the processing of the blockchain to a permissioned Ledger that contains only pseudonymous audit commitments related to keyed entries on the Ledger. This work describes an implementation of this protocol in Solidity 0.8.30 and provides metrics for the gas use and latency of the smart contract for 100 iterations of 100 total Enrollment and Verification Workflows each. Twenty Adversarial Functional Tests are also described that attempt to place the system into an invalid state, as well as four additional tests that assess the effect of batched submission to the smart contract of multiple keyed audit commitments. The smart contract processing throughput is also determined for a batch of submissions, finding a maximum local throughput of 60.2 tx/s. A further 50,000 randomized reference-model transitions of the systemâs internal reference-model were then made (involving a total of 57,345,087 invariant checks, all of which passed), as well as a measurement of the time taken to generate an HMAC-SHA-256-sized commitment for 10,000 iterations (local median time = 0.002 ms). The results of this work provide a solid foundation for the blockchain component of BIBIS, but it is not intended to provide any insights into the accuracy of neonatal biometric matching, the presentation attack resistance of the system, or even the usability of BIBIS by clinical end-users. The results also do not comment on the finality of QBFT-based commits to a blockchain.
This paper seeks to develop an empirically tested theoretical model that measures the block chain related awareness, confidence, and perceived relevance regarding finances among employees in the Turkish financial services sector. From the existing literature on blockchain adoption, the acceptance of fintech, and trust-based investment behavior, the authors developed an initial item pool consisting of 14 items. Content validation was done through experts followed by a pilot. Primary data was collected from 450 finance professionals working in the banking, treasury, risk, and accounting departments of different companies within Istanbul. The questionnaire was filled out by the respondents during the period March to April 2025 and was distributed online. Internal consistency was calculated using Cronbachâs alpha coefficient, while the structure of the underlying scale was investigated by Principal component analysis with oblique rotation. This analysis was complemented with item analysis through corrected item-total correlations and calculation of communalities. The data quality for conducting factor analysis were validated by KMO and Bartlettâs test of sphericity. From the results of the two-factor solution, the total variance explained was 85.83%. The first factor covered perceptions pertaining to blockchain awareness and informational engagement while the second predominately covered confidence in blockchains financial functionality and trustworthiness. The final structure is comprised of 14 items that have high loadings and little redundancy. The results indicate that the scale is not only clear-cut conceptually and statistically, but also provides a consistent measure for further studies regarding the perception and acceptance of technology in the finance domain.
As the growth of the FinTech platforms continues, there is an increasing demand for intelligent, secure and traceable solutions that can provide real-time detection of fraudulent transactions and shield financial records from manipulation. In this research, an Artificial Intelligence-powered blockchain framework, combining machine learning for fraud detection and permissioned blockchain for validation, was proposed. It was found that ensemble models performed better than a linear baseline. The overall best balance of precision, specificity and F1 score was obtained with the Random Forest model, and the highest precisionârecall was obtained with the Extra Trees model, with fraud recall slightly better. In addition, feature-importance analysis revealed a small number of transaction attributes, which were anonymised, that most significantly affected fraud classification. The chosen model was then connected to a prototype of a chained hash blockchain that preserved the hashes of transactions, the time, the predicted probability of fraud, the validation result, and the version of the model. Through hash inconsistency, the prototype was able to detect any transaction modifications which might have been made on purpose and successfully ensured ledger integrity. The results illustrate how both AI and blockchain technologies complement each other. AI is effective in detecting fraud accurately and on time, and blockchain enhances the traceability, auditability and tamper resistance of transactions.
The rapid digitalization of healthcare has led to the generation of vast amounts of sensitive patient information, increasing the need for advanced security solutions beyond traditional centralized systems. This study examines the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology as a transformative approach to healthcare data security. Conventional electronic health record systems often face challenges such as single points of failure, limited transparency, and vulnerability to cyber threats. Blockchain addresses these issues by providing a decentralized and immutable ledger that ensures data integrity, traceability, and secure record management through cryptographic techniques and consensus protocols. In parallel, AI strengthens security by enabling intelligent threat detection, predictive analytics, and adaptive authentication mechanisms. Machine learning algorithms continuously analyze network activities and user behaviors to identify potential breaches and insider threats in real time. The combination of AI and blockchain creates a synergistic framework in which AI enhances blockchain efficiency, while blockchain provides a transparent and trustworthy environment for AI-driven data processing. The study further explores the role of blockchain-secured federated learning, which enables collaborative model training across healthcare institutions without exposing sensitive patient data. Key challenges, including interoperability, scalability, regulatory compliance, and integration with legacy systems, are also discussed. Additionally, patient empowerment is enhanced through self-sovereign identity models that grant individuals greater control over their personal health information. Despite challenges related to computational complexity and standardization, the convergence of AI and blockchain offers a proactive, resilient, and privacy-preserving security architecture for modern healthcare. Future research should focus on lightweight cryptographic solutions, quantum-resistant security mechanisms, and governance frameworks for decentralized healthcare ecosystems. Overall, this integration represents a significant step toward secure, transparent, and patient-centered digital healthcare systems.
Cryptocurrency users have increasingly become targets of phishing and scam attacks. To mitigate these threats, leading crypto wallets (e.g., MetaMask) have introduced transaction simulation, which previews a transaction's balance changes before on-chain execution. While effective against traditional fund-draining attacks, we show that this defense can itself be exploited by a new phishing technique, which we term transaction simulation phishing. This attack uses carefully crafted smart contracts whose execution depends on dynamic blockchain state, causing simulations to display benign or profitable outcomes while the actual on-chain execution redirects users' funds to attacker-controlled addresses. We present the first comprehensive study of transaction simulation phishing. We first develop a taxonomy of phishing contracts that can be utilized to facilitate this attack. Then, we propose SIMGUARD, a bytecode-level detection system that combines static and dynamic program analysis to identify phishing contracts. Applying SIMGUARD to Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, and Polygon, we detect over 4,000 phishing contracts deployed between August 2024 and June 2025. Our analysis identifies more than 5,700 victims and approximately $3.48 million USD in losses, 91.5% of which occurred on Ethereum. Moreover, our clustering result reveals that the largest phishing contract cluster alone accounts for about 83% of the total losses. These results expose a critical weakness in current wallet defenses and highlight the urgent need for more robust transaction simulation mechanisms.
Automated market makers exchange assets through liquidity pools whose quoted prices depend on their reserves, with constant product pools being the most common. When such pools reside on different blockchains or shards, a sequence of swaps cannot in general be executed atomically. Aanes et al. introduced lock-swaps and retroactive constant product liquidity pools to provide price guarantees for such a setting. A retroactive pool implicitly maintains a virtual pool for each possible execute/cancel resolution of its active locks. In the presence of active locks, serving a new swap request requires computing a safe quote; a quote with an output that does not exceed the minimum possible output, taken over all virtual pools. The quote being safe is a hard constraint ensuring the integrity of the pool. A soft constraint is to make the quote as close to the minimum possible output as possible. Aanes et al. gave a simple and efficient algorithm for computing the exact minimum when unresolved provides and reclaims of liquidity do not coexist, showed by an explicit example that the algorithm fails in general, and left the computational complexity of the general case open. In this paper, we show that unless P is equal to NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm that computes in the general case a safe quote with any fixed multiplicative approximation ratio (e.g., 50%) relative to the exact minimum. This seems like a severe obstacle for deployment of the lock-swap functionality. However, we also present two simple and practical algorithms for computing safe quotes that have input-dependent approximation ratios that are likely to be satisfactory in practice, thus circumventing that obstacle.
Yanzheng Jin, Pengyang Shao, Xiaohao Liu, Xi Ai · 6 authors
Financial trading relies on extracting reliable signals from heterogeneous market modalities such as price series, breaking news, and investor sentiment. Existing multimodal methods primarily combine heterogeneous modalities to exploit complementarity, treating each modality as equally valuable while overlooking whether different modalities provide mutually supportive evidence for the same trading signal. However, this task-conditioned and non-canceling support, termed multimodal corroboration, is particularly valuable, especially for financial trading. Because individual financial views are noisy and weakly informative, support that persists across heterogeneous views may provide a more stable task-relevant signal than evidence appearing in only one view. To exploit this property, we propose CoLAS (multimodal Corroboration of Latent Asset Signals), a framework that operationalizes multimodal corroboration as a trainable task-conditioned representation for trading prediction. The modality representations are organized into a per-instance matrix, where a softmax-based spectral objective strengthens its dominant shared component. Signed modality contributions then determine whether this component provides non-canceling support and construct the resulting corroborated signal. A coupled robustness-aware consistency objective further preserves the resulting corroborated signal when a modality is corrupted or missing. Extensive experiments on stock and cryptocurrency datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CoLAS, yielding consistent improvements in both annualized return and Sharpe ratio over existing methods.
Xiaoye Zheng, Yujing Chen, Minghao Wu, David Lo · 8 authors
Solana is an emerging blockchain platform designed for high throughput and low transaction fees, making it inexpensive to submit transactions at scale and, consequently, increasing exposure to bot spamming and related financial exploitation. Solana bots are typically off-chain software systems that operate in a competitive on-chain execution environment by constructing and submitting transactions, and the bot-related transactions on the decentralized exchanges exceed 250 million dollars in daily trading volume in January 2026. Prior studies on Solana have examined system performance, smart-contract security, and specific on-chain phenomena. However, we still lack a systematic understanding of what Solana bots implement in practice and how these implementations manifest as observable on-chain execution fingerprints. To address this gap, we performed a large-scale empirical study of Solana bots from two complementary views: (i) 586 bot repositories collected from GitHub, and (ii) 200 bot addresses on Solana, with over 44 million on-chain transactions. Our study derives an implementation-grounded taxonomy of Solana bots comprising 15 categories grouped into five domains (e.g., Trading Operations, MEV, and On-chain Analytics), identifies a largely shared five-stage operational pipeline manifested in bot implementations, and uncovers systematic variation in on-chain trading behaviors of Solana bots across diverse trading platforms and assets. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions, and provide recommendations for building and operating bots on the Solana blockchain.
Giuseppe Cavaliere, Thomas Mikosch, Anders Rahbek, Frederik Vilandt
This paper develops bootstrap inference for autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models observed over a fixed calendar span, so that the number of durations is random. We study recursive schemes that either fix the calendar span or the realized event count. For the fixed-count bootstrap, we establish consistency when the duration tail index satisfies $Îș\geq1$. When $0<Îș<1$, classical consistency fails because the estimator has a mixed-normal limit, but the bootstrap reproduces its conditional Gaussian component. Consequently, basic percentile intervals remain first-order valid and bootstrap $t$-statistics are asymptotically standard normal. Monte Carlo experiments show accurate finite-sample inference across finite- and infinite-mean regimes and robustness to non-exponential innovations. An application to cryptocurrency ETF transaction durations finds strong persistence and illustrates the practical difference between fixed-count and random-count inference.
This article presents the DigInTraCE Blockchain Module, a secure and scalable framework for managing Digital Product Passports (DPPs) and traceability data across industrial supply chains. Built on Hyperledger Fabric, the solution combines distributed ledger technology, cloud-native infrastructure, smart contracts, and standardized EPCIS 2.0 traceability to enable trusted collaboration among multiple stakeholders. The technical article describes the platform architecture, governance mechanisms, secure API integration, identity management, and blockchain-based validation processes that support transparent, interoperable, and auditable product lifecycle information. The proposed framework provides a robust foundation for future Digital Product Passport implementations and circular industrial value chains.
We establish global exponential turnpike properties for quadratic optimal tracking problems governed by the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation with localized internal control. For every initial datum, finite-horizon optimal solutions approach the unique optimal periodic regime when the periodic tracking target is sufficiently small; the zero-target case yields a global steady turnpike at the origin, with no smallness assumption on the initial datum. To our knowledge, these are the first global exponential turnpike results for the viscous Burgers equation. The proof combines a local exponential turnpike, obtained through strict convexity and periodic Riccati theory, with a parabolic dissipation argument that provides an absorbing time independent of the horizon.
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Stability and Controllability of Differential Equations
To managing identities in a secure and decentralized manner, new opportunities have emerged because of recent breakthroughs in blockchain technology and biometric authentication. Blockchain is different from traditional biometric systems in that it is an unchangeable, distributed ledger that runs safe, decentralized code. Traditional biometric systems store data in one location and canât be updated. Traditional biometric systems have some flaws, including template tampering, channel interception, and comparator overrides. So, the proposed work presents a Distributed Multimodal Biometric Security System with Blockchain to handle such issues. This system uses 3D face and 3D ear biometrics with blockchain technology, which comprises IPFS, smart contracts, and decentralized applications. Features from 3D face and 3D ear are embedded into a single multimodal template, which then undergoes encryption and storage on IPFS via content-addressed storage. The Content Identifier (CID) and data are then archived by smart contracts on the blockchain to maintain data integrity, security, verifiability, and immutability. In this way, a person can prove his identity without using any central services, further improving privacy. Blockchain consensus and the smart-contract-based access control mechanism further provide security, audibility, and simplicity to P2P transactions in biometric enrolment testing results show that feature extraction takes from 120 ms to 300 ms, uploading to IPFS takes between 200 and 600 ms, and completing blockchain transactions on local private network takes from 0.5 to 1 s, using 117,519 gas per enrolment. Additional analysis on the Ethereum Sepolia test network reveals that transaction fees change depending on network conditions, but gas consumption stays deterministic. The suggested solution is resistant to typical attacks like replay, interception, and template alteration; it is also irreversible, revocable, and unlinkable, according to security analysis conducted under a formal adversarial model.
Quantum computing poses a significant threat to classical asymmetric cryptography, which is essential for ensuring confidentiality, authentication, and key exchange in contemporary digital infrastructures. Although post-quantum cryptography (PQC) provides mechanisms that resist quantum attacks, its implementation in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is challenged by constrained resources, including limitations in computation, memory, energy, latency, and bandwidth, and the heterogeneity of devices. This paper offers a comprehensive narrative review of PQC approaches applicable to IoT, systematically organizing 30 peer-reviewed studies published between 2022 and 2026 across four layers: device, communication, distributed trust, and application. Additionally, the review examines two cross-cutting dimensions, privacy and side-channel resistance. The analysis indicates a significant prevalence of lattice-based schemes, hybrid strategies, and integrations with blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proofs, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, AI, and Zero Trust architectures. Notably, key gaps remain in side-channel evaluation, migration pathways, deployment costs, and real-world validationâissues that are particularly critical given the long lifecycles of IoT devices and the ongoing threat of âharvest now, decrypt laterâ attacks.